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Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

The barrier to entry to becoming a Ruby programmer is as low as can be: all you need is a laptop and internet access. You can become a celebrity without people even knowing your name, let alone your face: why_ (or _why or whatever) was at one point the biggest name in Ruby (AFAICT from outside), and he might have been a cat with a keyboard for all anyone knew.

On top of that, there's plenty of famous and powerful non-white engineers. And if you don't want to look at the top, look at your peers: in my university in America, whites are the minority in most gradute CS classes.

By all objective measures, this is the last industry where people should be subject to a witch-hunt and have their conference cancelled because of their speaker lineup.

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> The barrier to entry to becoming a Ruby programmer is as low as can be

This isn't a conversation about being a programmer, however. This is a conversation about being part of a programming community. Successful assimilation into a community has numerous benefits for one's career prospects, social life and overall success. Exclusion can be correspondingly damaging.

As a result, programming communities all over the place are having a tough conversation: is this community sufficiently inclusive? Some are indifferent to the cause of inclusiveness. What's unfortunate is that those most indifferent seem so consistently to be those most already included.

So in this case, some people decided they were uncomfortable with the level of inclusion. That's a fair conversation to have.

(As it happens, while _why's true identity may have been a secret, his membership in the racial and gender majority group for his field is not:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q... )

> So in this case, some people decided they were uncomfortable with the level of inclusion. That's a fair conversation to have.

Certainly. But when the conversation turns into accusations of racism and a boycott (or feared boycott?) that ends with the sponsors running away and the conference being cancelled, it's a sign that the conversation has gone astray.

In fact, it's hard to even have a rational conversation on inclusivity in CS if we're already at the point where such things happen. We really need cooler heads to have a rational debate.

"If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-...

The author of the linked Forbes commentary touches but fails to understand that most poor black kids in urban areas do not have convenient or easy access to a computer. If they're lucky, they'll have access to a working computer at their school. If they're really lucky, they may even live close enough to the public library to use those computers.

The author fails to grasp that a kid from Oakland, Cleveland, or South LA, has never heard of TED, or Academic Earth, or Khan Academy. He has no idea that there are free resources available online, and no reason to expect such.

But what can you expect? The Forbes article is written by a very wealthy, middle-aged, white man who had both parents and lived in a wealthy neighborhood.

/sarcasm

They didn't "have their conference cancelled". They cancelled it because they felt pressure from their sponsors. Without more example or explanation, we have to take them at their word that the pressure was on level with a witch-hunt. If that's the case, that is indeed a poor state of affairs in terms of open debate and civility.

If I organised a conference, and failed to attract a single female speaker, especially in a community where sexism is a sensitive issue, I would immediately decide to cancel it of my own volition. I don't want to contribute to the type of things that make women feel excluded.

So if women choose not to be included on your activity, you would cancel it, because women would feel excluded? OK....

If I never took part in anything that didn't attract females (that were not family), I would have never learned anything, or seen any movies, or eaten any food...

That's a bit of a disingenuous comparison. Organizing a conference that should be representative of a very large, diverse community is not quite the same as organizing personal activities.

They cancelled it because they felt pressure from their sponsors.

I'm skeptical about this. The company I work for were the only sponsor formally announced on their site. We were behind them 100% and didn't have a clue about the controversy or the cancellation until we found out after they made their decision. It doesn't add up. If financial strain was a reason, why not contact us to see if we could help?

Doesn't that make the speaker lineup even more peculiar?

That's a good point, but keep in mind three things:

1) It's a process. We already have non-white people in top positions (both in the industry and in academia), so there's no lack of inspiration, but it takes time for those who have inspired to make their way through school and immigration. Right now there are multitudes of Indian and Chinese students in American universities: in a few years you'll see them at conferences. And that is already going to happen: they're certainly not going to drop out of their degrees and go home because some Brits were not diverse enough with their conference in Manchester.

2) From what I've seen, many of those students are more interested in enterprise or research applications than in doing web development with Ruby, so you might see them at slightly different conferences.

3) This particular conference was in the UK, not in America or in India or in China or in France. Let's be careful not to call the entire country racist just because it's mostly populated by whites.

The conference speakers, though, were not limited to being British.

I agree with #2, but Ruby is a fairly special case, in that its creator, and still one of its main contributors, is Japanese. So you can't make the argument "if only non-whites stepped it up in Ruby dev"...(but the argument that none of the Japanese speakers could make it/were affordable/wanted to come is still legit).

It's true that the speakers were not limited to being British, but it's more expensive for someone outside the country to attend (even with compensation, they'd still expend more time, undergo more stress, etc.). Also, it was a new conference, not a large and established one, so it seems natural that it would have mainly a local draw. They may have even made the choice to invite more local speakers, to promote the Manchester/UK tech scene, which would be a worthwhile goal for such a conference, although it's directly at odds with the diversity goal.

It's true that Ruby is a Japanese invention (I wonder if all these racists are aware of what they're bringing into their good ol' boys' club ;)), but as you note, Japan is so far away that there are still difficulties in participating in a little new conference in Manchester. Also, Ruby got its big break with Rails, which was developed in Chicago, I think, so the Japanese community might not have gotten as much of a headstart as one would expect. Or maybe they are using Ruby for far more interesting things than web development. I don't know.

> Also, Ruby got its big break with Rails, which was developed in Chicago, I think, so the Japanese community might not have gotten as much of a headstart as one would expect. Or maybe they are using Ruby for far more interesting things than web development. I don't know.

And I think that's the heart of the matter...The Japanese (or any number of non-European/American Ruby communities) could be doing something amazing...and we would have a hard time knowing, because of the inherent geographical and language barriers. That's why it's not just the "moral" thing to make an effort toward diversity, but it is a potential creative and intellectual boon.

In any case, the OP should've just included a statement saying, "we asked speakers x,y,z, for example, but each had a previous commitment, etc. etc. etc.". In fact, that's a point they should've made more prominently in the debate before canceling the conference.

Rails was developed when David Heinemeier Hansson was still in his home town, Copenhagen, Denmark. He was working part-time for 37signals, but it was several more years before he moved to Chicago.

Wow. Does anything of value get invented in an office environment?

You bring up good points as well, although I would disagree with one of your main assumptions:

"so there's no lack of inspiration" --> Really, can you point to the numbers?

Like I said, in my university in America I see a majority of non-white students in CS. I really can't see them thinking "can I really do this? should I be doing this? why is my face different from all the other computer guys' faces?". Heck, a huge chunk of the professors are also non-white.

Guys!

It's cool. Everything is totally cool.

I haven't had a boss who wasn't a white male in nearly a decade, women are still harassed at conferences, and we can only find white guys to talk at a conference about a language invented by a Japanese guy.

But Camillo's class has foreigners in it, so everything is completely okay now.

There's a big difference between the composition of your university class and the social makeup of a professional community. Let's talk when you're out in your career.

anonymous was asking about a lack of inspiration. The fact that there are so many students shows that they are definitely being inspired to enter the field.

That last line is interesting. You lead up to presenting a scenario where one might rightfully expect a conference to naturally reflect a diverse speaker lineup, reflecting the diversity in the industry overall. I agree with that.

But I am not sure what you mean by the last line. Do you mean: 1: "This is the last industry where it should be necessary to criticise or cancel a conference with an all-male lineup [so the fact that this conference does in fact have an all-male lineup, in the context of this particular community having problems with sexism in the past, raises a huge red flag, and probably should be canceled]".

or do you mean: 2. "This is the last industry to have issues with sexism because we are so diverse, so when one conference comes along where this diversity is not represented, it shouldn't be an issue".

I find both reasonable I guess. Although considering the fact that this topic is already a sensitive issue, I lead more towards opinion 1.

FYI: I don't think the OP was talking about physical barrier to entries. That's all the more reason why such a big disparity between privileged males and all other minorities in programming should be frightening!

Please see my reply to hmahncke, it should address your point.

We are pretty sure _why is a white (afai can tell?) dude from France.

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